Akio Morita

The founder of Sony

"Curiosity is the key to creativity."

After World War II, Japanese companies began flooding the American
market with many inexpensive and poorly made products, and most
Americans associated the words "Made in Japan" with poor
quality. Akio Morita changed that perception by building an
international company whose name is associated with innovative and
high-quality products around the world.

He was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1921. The Morita family had been brewing
sake and soy sauce for 14 generations. As the oldest son, he was
expected to take over the business, but Akio was more interested in
tinkering with electronics.

Morita graduated with a degree in physics from Osaka Imperial
University. During World War II, he was a lieutenant in the Japanese
Navy and met an electrical engineer named Masru Ibuka. After the war, he
was offered a teaching position at Tokyo Institute of Technology, but he
read an newspaper article about Ibuka opening a research lab and went to
visit him. The two men decided to form a partnership.

Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka

In 1946, they started Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, Corp. in a
bombed-out department store in the ruins of postwar Tokyo. Ibuka focused
on engineering and product design, while Morita handled marketing,
personnel and financing. Their first product was an automatic rice
cooker, but it was not very successful.

There wasn’t much of a consumer market in post-war Japan because the
economy had been devastated by the war, so Morita looked to the West as
a market for his products. Many Japanese companies enjoyed modest
success by building cheap knock-offs of products developed in the West,
but Morita wanted to develop new and innovative products of his own.

They wanted to develop a tape recorder, but couldn’t find a source for
magnetic tape. They had to make their own tape by grinding up magnets
and sticking the powder to strips of paper so that they could test their
prototypes. They perfected Japan’s first magnetic tape recorder in
1950, and after some aggressive marketing by Morita, it was a modest
success.

By 1955, Morita was trying to design a pocket-sized radio for the
American market, but the smallest radio they were able to make was still
a little too large. He solved that problem by having his salesmen wear
shirts with larger pockets, so that they could slip the radio in and out
of their shirt pocket during demonstrations. The radios they sold became
the first commercially successful transistor radio and was very popular
around the world.

Morita's "Pocket-sized" Radio

Morita realized that brand-name identification was as important as good
products to the company’s success. Tokyo Telecommunications
Engineering, Corp was quite a mouthful, and he wanted a name that would
be easy to pronounce and easy to remember. Everyone else thought he was
crazy to change the name of a successful company, but in 1958, he
changed the company’s name to Sony. It was made up from the Latin word
sonus, which means sound, and sonny, which he thought was a
"friendly" term that also sounded like the sun.

In 1960, he formed an American subsidiary called Sony Corporation of
America. In 1961, Sony was the first Japanese corporation to have it’s
stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Morita moved his family to New York City in 1963. He wanted to learn all
he could about Americans and their culture, so that Sony could design
products tailored to the American market. He also spent a lot of time
socializing with the rich and powerful elite and was able to build
lasting relationships with many of America’s business and political
leaders.

During the 1970s, portable tape players were popular in America, but
they were big and heavy. Morita had an idea for a small battery-powered
tape player with headphones, so that a person could listen to music and
still have great freedom of movement. Many people in the industry
believed that a tape player without a record function would never catch
on, but Morita knew he could make the device much smaller and more
portable without it. Morita’s instincts were right, and Sony’s
Walkman has been one of the most successful personal electronics
products ever, with over 250 million units sold since it’s debut in
1979.

Sony Walkman

Sony was the first Japanese company to build a manufacturing facility in
the United States. Over time, Morita set up many other manufacturing,
R&D and design centers in North America, Europe and Asia. He
believed that Sony should contribute to the economies of the countries
where their biggest markets were located.

Akio Morita was friendly, cheerful and outgoing. Many said that he had a
natural radiance and that he captivated the attention of everyone he
came into contact with. His excellent communication skills and great
charm allowed him to easily bridge the cultural gap between Japan and
the West. He was a workaholic, but he also liked sports and remained
very active throughout his life; even taking up water skiing, scuba
diving and wind surfing in his sixties.

But Morita’s passion was innovation. Sony developed the first
successful battery-powered portable TV, the Trinitron picture tube,
which set a new standard of quality for color TV, and the first color
home video recorder called the Betamax. Sony also developed several
media standards; the 3 ½ inch floppy drive, 8mm video tape and the
audio CD in a joint effort with Phillips.

First Betamax Video Recorder

Morita had a stroke in 1993, while playing tennis and was confined to a
wheelchair. He died of pneumonia in 1999, at the age of 78. At the time
of his death, Akio Morita was the most famous Japanese citizen in the
world and Sony was the number one consumer brand in the United States.